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Samuel Hammond 🌐🏛 Profile picture
Samuel Hammond 🌐🏛
@hamandcheese
Senior economist @joinFAI. Nonresident fellow @NiskanenCenter. Pluralist. 'The world is second best, at best.' | samuel@thefai.org
Potato Of Reason Profile picture David Gloyn-Cox  🐉 Profile picture 2 subscribed
May 30, 2023 • 13 tweets • 7 min read
This from @ByrneHobart also underlies my intuition that AI's impact on government will be more fragmenting than centralizing.

Mass production is giving way to mass differentiation, which undercuts the Coasian logic of a uniform regulatory state.
thediff.co/archive/data-p… Image @ByrneHobart I'm looking forward to the new Richard Langlois book which deals with these themes in the context of 20th century managerialism. As he notes, the second-best logic of vertically integrated managerialism already began unwinding in the 70s. amazon.com/Corporation-Tw… ImageImage
Mar 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Who's making the GPT-4 teddy bear that will talk with your infant child and teach them a 2nd language? Seems like such an obvious product. Furby is in for a massive upgrade. The camera in its head will recognize your child's face and send a push notification if it sees something strange. Parents will track learning progress, inject prompts and review transcripts through the app, all for a small monthly subscription.
Dec 7, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
To capitalize on AI without starting a company? Hold an index fund and buy property.

A productivity boom in goods and services should cause prices to drop and relative value to flow into scarce factors like real estate and commodities.

Starting a company will also get easier. In any scenario where AI leads to super abundance it will be hard not to share in the wealth by accident. Monetary wealth would be a lot less relevant in general. Unless there's a middle-period where you need wealth to buttress the societal effects of sub-superintelligence.
Dec 6, 2022 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
The second-order implications of near-term AI have not been fully grokked by America’s political classes.

Here's what I think is coming:

secondbest.ca/p/before-the-f… Whatever you think of the Singularity, we know most people have a poor intuitive grasp of exponential trends.

But with Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT, no one can now deny that deep learning is capable of borderline magic.

It’s crazy to think it’s just getting started.
Nov 20, 2022 • 34 tweets • 19 min read
1) I've been meaning to explain...

Why I'm not (exactly) an Effective Altruist

So here we go.

[NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. MY METAETHICS MAY BE FAULTY, ETC.]

secondbest.ca/p/why-im-not-e… 2) EAs love to debate normative ethics.

But where do abstract moral concepts derive their motivational power?

What resources do we draw upon to know if or when to reject a vulgar utilitarian calculus?

And if those resources always existed, what's the theory for, exactly?
Nov 10, 2022 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Re: SBF / FTX

Most criminals are not sociopaths. In fact, most have a conventional sense of right and wrong.

Crime is instead largely about situational psychology, and the availability of convenient excuses to "neutralize" the force of prevailing norms.

sweettalkconversation.com/2016/02/09/tec… Criminologists once thought that crime arose from deviant subcultures with inverted moral values. Yet try stealing from a gang member and see if they like it!

In reality, crime tends to arise in social settings that provide for self-serving excuses to bypass the usual norm.
Jul 9, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Luxury wines are a trillion dollar a year industry, yet wine tasters can't distinguish between low and high quality wines in blind tastings, will rank wines higher based on the price or label, and have even been fooled with a bit of food coloring into thinking white wine is red. Many people know this and move on, or convince themselves that they're the exception. Yet if you're like me and are incapable of mental compartmentalization, awareness of the extent self-deception in the wine industry has profound practical and epistemological implications.
Jul 7, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Stagnant or declining population growth => stagnant living standards: The Malthusian intuition is for more people to equal less per person. So how can a growing population grow *per-capita* living standards?

More people =
- more ideas
- more scale and agglomeration
- higher ROI for fixed capital investment
- potential dynamic efficiencies
Jun 17, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Woah! Michael Cassidy is proposing a large marriage bonus that would have to be paid back if you divorced. Is that not incredibly based? Comes with a per-child stipend. A populist Republican running for Congress in Mississippi is proposing a large child allowance for married families in Mississippi. Welcome to 2022. Though not sure why younger kids get less and not the other way around.
May 21, 2022 • 20 tweets • 14 min read
I liked this Straussian take on @tylercowen and @danielgross's new book, Talent, but I think it's missing the forest for the trees.

Talent is actually a work of Austrian economics. Let me explain.

@tylercowen @danielgross The Austrian school is differentiated from other schools of economics by two related conceptual moves:
- the need to disaggregate reified objects like "the capital stock"
- and a focus on market processes rather than static equilibrium analysis
May 21, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Is it just me or was Stefanie Kelton's recent Oddlots interview completely incoherent? She repeatedly sidesteps what MMT says to do about inflation and deficit reduction. Asked directly, she says we need to address the climate crisis with a job guarantee and 4 day work week. wut When pressed, she goes on a detour through the chartalist theory of money creation, but then admits its probably not politically realistic to have Congress manage the business cycle with tax increases. Yet we're going to optimally control inflation by adjusting the work week?
Jan 25, 2022 • 10 tweets • 6 min read
Devastating new results on the effects of state-funded pre-K programs.

In policy you rarely get stronger study designs than random assignment + multi-year longitudinal follow-up.

Yikes.

doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi… This study corroborates widely discussed 2018 findings that used random assignment in Tennessee's pre-K program.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Jan 23, 2022 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Cool site that lets you search recent stock transactions by members of Congress.

app.capitoltrades.com Image It's interesting to see which Congress people are the most active in the stock market. I think these are trading volumes for the past 365 days. ImageImage
Jan 20, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I thought some of this DEI stuff was being exaggerated, but I was just at external management training that was beyond parody.

I recognized a dozen or more DC policy nonprofits with staff in attendance.

Embarrassing for my colleagues but sociologically enlightening nonetheless. I got booted after "speaking up and taking action" to explain why their claims to equity and inclusion were actually deeply exclusionary, alienating, and even classist for anyone leading a team that's genuinely diverse and not a bunch of progressive drones.
Jan 6, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
She's doubling down!

Tax credits 👏 aren't 👏 income.

Monthly CPS asks many questions about earnings *before taxes and deductions.* The "money income" question Rachidi refers to is likewise for earnings, Social Security, interest payments, etc. -- **not** advanced tax refunds. You pay taxes on "money income."

UI benefits are taxable as "money income," for ex. That's why they're counted as income in the official poverty measure (tho I think they're simulated for the monthly).

You don't count tax credits as "income" and census interviewers know that.
Jan 5, 2022 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Skill in econ is neither a proxy for education or actual "skill." Being really skilled at Sumerian carpentry techniques could land you a gig at a museum or a job flipping hamburgers. It's all about what skills are actually in demand while being relatively scarce. "Being Tom Cruise" is a high skill job because there's only one Tom Cruise, and he sells a lot of movie tickets. Sure, he does his own stunts, but relative to other equally skilled stuntmen, that's not what explains his earnings premium.
Nov 16, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I'm proud as a Canadian to not know the name of a single one of them! Did this guy get a little too handsy in college? His hair doo says "yes," but who knows or cares? No Canadian, that's for sure. Image
Oct 19, 2021 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
.@AEI's @AngelaRachidi unpacks some recent survey data and finds that the CTC expansion had no impact on work:

5% worked less, 5% worked more, +/- 2.5%

Encouraging results!

aei.org/poverty-studie… @AEI @AngelaRachidi 84% of households making less than $30,000 / year stated that the CTC was either somewhat or very important to meeting day-to-day expenses!
Oct 19, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Though I disagree with Manchin on the CTC, I also strangely respect him for the cajones required to be the lone holdout on a reform that would reduce child poverty by 40% with the backing of the entire Democratic caucus (including Sinema: her issue is only with overall cost). Beyond his direct colleagues, extending the CTC expansion is also supported by most anti-poverty experts, a majority of major media outlets and commentators, and hundreds of academic economists. It reminds me of a parable @tylercowen once gave on Bayesianism in a class I had.
Oct 18, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Spot on from @ThePlumLineGS.

Manchin keeps moving the goal post on the CTC, even if it harms kids in his own state, because there's no rhyme or reason to his demands other than tight fistedness for it's own sake. It's a kind of performative austerity.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… According to the Axios reporting, Manchin wants the CTC capped for families at 60k. Without specifics, we interpreted that as the phaseout threshold for joint and single filers alike just to get a sense of the magnitudes: It'd represent a cut to the CTC expansion of at least 49%.
Sep 9, 2021 • 24 tweets • 10 min read
New report!

Cost Disease Socialism: How Subsidizing Costs While Restricting Supply Drives America’s Fiscal Imbalance

Give it a read: 🧵

niskanencenter.org/cost-disease-s… In an era of soaring costs for core goods like healthcare, higher ed, housing & child care, the traditional socialist call to “seize the means of production” has been updated to something closer to “subsidize my cost of living” — a less revolutionary ambition, but no less myopic.